I live in Thomas Square, but I'm less than half a block from the Metropolitan neighborhood on the other side of Bull Street. Both sides of the street, however, are in the federally designated Thomas Square Streetcar Historic District.

As noted in Sunday's coverage, some have used the term "Starland" for pretty much the whole neighborhood south of Forsyth Park - "SoFo," others would like to call it. And the neighborhood is covered by the Mid-City zoning ordinance.

You'll frequently hear people who don't live here refer to this part of the city as "midtown," but don't get that confused with the Midtown neighborhood that lies several blocks east.

The conflicting nomenclature is kind of quaint sometimes, I suppose, but the confusion periodically hurts public discourse and compromises urban planning.

For example, we routinely hear the term "west Savannah" applied to any crimes west of Bull Street and south of Forsyth Park, but West Savannah is a distinct neighborhood a couple of miles away.

During the lengthy public debate about the best location for a new arena, the vague uses of the word "west" obscured the proximity of the chosen site to hotels, SCAD dorms and tourist destinations like the Georgia State Railroad Museum and the visitor center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

We have also frequently treated important streets as dividing lines rather than as the center of key corridors.

We've spent a lot of time studying the "MLK corridor," but long stretches of the street have a median that separates one side harshly from the other.

Bull Street, which many of us consider Savannah's civic spine, acts as a dividing line between locally recognized neighborhoods from Forsyth Park all the way to DeRenne Avenue.

In the current controversy about a new Central Precinct location, city officials are speciously arguing that a site only six short blocks from the current location will catalyze a neighborhood transformation.

One West Victory and Hugh Acheson's fabulous new restaurant The Florence are actually in Bingville, but it seems as if residents of Metropolitan, Thomas Square and Ardsley Park are staking claim.

About 10 years ago, I took a page from the playbook of the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority and began routinely using phrases like "greater downtown area" to avoid unnecessary, reductive and confusing demarcations.